Unromancing No Joan Sutherland - Awakened Life

playing its own version of our game: “That’s all very
well, your experience of the shining whole, but
what about this? Is this it, too?”
If hope remains anywhere inside you that
awakening will save you from having to live your
life, that illusion will now be well and truly
shattered. Here is your life, demanding to be lived.
Here is the next gift of the koans, provoking you to
discover whether you really can integrate what
you've come to know of the vastness with what
you've come to see more clearly about the everyday.
This can be a difficult time, but if you hold through,
something genuinely transforming happens: You
find that you are content to be living this human
life, and you no longer need things to be different in
order to be happy. This sounds rather unromantic
and small, but to genuinely feel like this is to be
free.
Hand in hand with this is the deep desire for
things to get better so that others can find their own
way to happiness. In the world view of the koans, it
somehow makes perfect sense to be committed to
changing things for the benefit of others without
needing to change them for yourself. The level at
which you might do this isn’t grand: nothing about
trying to convert people or invading to bring them
democracy. What seems self-evidently desirable are
the fundamental things that make it possible for
others to get free: clean water, no bombs or
landmines, intervening in global warming before
people’s homes start disappearing under the waves.
Once Zhaozhou asked another teacher, Touzi,
how he’d describe coming back to life after a
profound breakthrough, which is sometimes called
a great death. Touzi replied that you can’t do it by
walking about in the night, by which he meant by
clinging to your breakthrough; you come back by
giving yourself to the daylight. To fully realize No,
you have to give yourself to the sunlit, everyday
world. You have to care, to make art and babies and
run for town council. You crash back into life
because life, with all its complications and
disappointments and heartbreak, is the ground of
our awakening.
As you step back into the everyday you’re not
abandoned to fate and blind chance, because there
are all the other koans. If you keep company with
them, they’ll show you how to deepen and widen
the opening that started with No. At first they show
you where the light shines brightly for you and
where it’s obscured, and they help the light spread
to the shaded places. Then they ask you to
articulate your experience as you go, which refines
your understanding. And all along they’re pushing
you to integrate the big view with your everyday
life. Koans make sure that once you’ve been
transformed you stay transformed.
I can’t say I completely understand how koans
like No work. I can’t say that they cause awakening
in any sense that we usually mean ‘cause’. Perhaps
they just keep us open, or off-balance, so that other
things can act upon us, so that we’re fetchable. This
week I think that their importance as a spiritual
technology lies in their ability to reliably show us
three aspects of awakening: the shining, eternal face
whose revelation is one of the deepest graces we
humans can experience; the shape-shifting face that
invites us, along with everything else, to dream the
world into existence; and the complicated earthly
face, in whose presence we have to care about the
world and exert ourselves on its behalf. And that
the koans encourage our doubt, and ask us to trust
our own experience, and don’t give an inch on the
important things. And I do notice that if people are
willing to take up a koan like No with their whole
selves, they tend to get kinder and wiser and more
courageous. I don’t know about happily ever after,
but that sure seems like happily right here and now
to me.
Sutherland
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Unromancing No